The Belgian candy that sparked an epic vendor battle. A tiny battle rages in Belgium, involving several vendors, a street brawl, a bucket of water, and legal action, all over one of the country’s lesser-known candies: cuberdons. These conical sweets are made from sugar, raspberry flavouring, gelatin, and gum arabic, with a candy shell on …

Butter or shortening? Milk or buttermilk? What is the true key to flakiness? These are the questions that plague biscuit makers everywhere, and they are the questions that I have set out, over the past 13 months, to answer once and for all. When you ask how to make biscuits, it seems that everyone and …

If you need to quickly answer the phone, the door or rescue a runaway toddler while your hands are full of sticky dough, rub dry cornmeal on your hands. This removes dough faster than washing your hands with soap and water. Noreen

An enlightening experiment is to knead the dough for a set amount of time and keep trying to form a ‘window’ with it. The window should look like this: You’ll be able to observe three phases: underkneaded: can’t form a window because not enough gluten kneaded: window forms because gluten is fully formed overkneaded: window …

Here’s a brief overview, glossed from Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, the definitive work of kitchen chemistry: What is Flour? Flour is made by milling wheat kernels into small particles and then sifting them. Most fours are refined, which means that they have been sieved to remove the germ and bran layers, leaving behind the protein- and …

The “best” way is to make sure the chocolate is properly tempered. This can be done with a microwave, but it’s very difficult to get right. It’s easier with a double-boiler / bain marie: Chop 1 pound of chocolate into pieces (avoid chocolates with wax, PGPR, or added vegetable fat as it’s more difficult to …

If your cakes are leaden and cookies doughy, your flour-measuring technique may need a makeover. I wish I could simply say, “Get out your scale and weigh the flour!” But until the day comes when all recipes include weights, we are stuck with measuring cups. The problem is that we don’t all use them the …

To pulverize nuts in a food processor without turning them to paste, be sure that the processor bowl and blade are dry and cool (not hot from the dishwasher) and the nuts are at room temperature (not cold from the fridge or freezer and not hot from toasting in the oven). Pulse until the nuts …

Here are my rules for racks and rotation (for non-convection gas ovens) when recipes don’t otherwise specify: To bake cake(s) on one rack: Position the rack in the lower third (just below center) of the oven. If baking more than one pan on the rack, rotate the pans from the front to the back a little over halfway …

Here’s the strategy: Mix all of the dough ahead, whenever you have time, and accumulate it in the fridge for 3 to 4 days, or in the freezer for longer. I like to shape butter cookie dough into logs to slice and bake or make batches of chocolate chip cookie dough to be shaped with …